{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/evaluating-prompts-across-multiple-choice","title":"Evaluating Prompts Across Multiple Choice Tasks In a Zero-Shot Setting","arxiv_id":"2203.15754","date":"2022-03-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Gabriel Orlanski"],"abstract":"Large language models have shown that impressive zero-shot performance can be achieved through natural language prompts (Radford et al., 2019; Brown et al., 2020; Sanh et al., 2021). Creating an effective prompt, however, requires significant trial and error. That \\textit{prompts} the question: how do the qualities of a prompt effects its performance? To this end, we collect and standardize prompts from a diverse range of tasks for use with tasks they were not designed for. We then evaluate these prompts across fixed multiple choice datasets for a quantitative analysis of how certain attributes of a prompt affect performance. We find that including the choices and using prompts not used during pre-training provide significant improvements. All experiments and code can be found https://github.com/gabeorlanski/zero-shot-cross-task.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15754v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.15754v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"evaluating-prompts-across-multiple-choice","repo_url":"https://github.com/gabeorlanski/zero-shot-cross-task","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"multiple-choice","task_name":"Multiple-choice"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}